Rey Misterio Jr. and Juventud Guerrera Go to the Extreme

In a cage in Aguascalientes, that is. For cars. And honor. And to give one of the sickest ECW spots of all time an early re-run.

AAA

The day Joseph and I put together the match list for this run of BIG EGG, a curious thing was happening on Twitter where, in an attempt to defend the likes of Will Ospreay, a certain substrata of wrestling fan was slandering Rey Mysterio, claiming, among other things, that he never used any wrestling holds. Whether or not this serves as adequate evidence to acquit Will Ospreay on the charge of being a dogshit professional wrestler, I don’t know, but the “Rey isn’t that good” bit got stuck in my craw, as it does every time it has recurred since about 2006 or so, when “Rey only won the title because of Eddie Guerrero’s death” was somehow a criticism of Rey Mysterio and not Vince McMahon, who only saw fit to push smaller wrestlers upon pain of federal investigation, tragedy, or fan revolt. 

In this house (and by “this house” I mean my own domicile in picturesque Durham, North Carolina — I know where Joseph stands), Rey Mysterio is the greatest wrestler of all time, more often than not. This match, contested within the confines of a shoddily-constructed steel cage with pink slips for a couple of unseen motor vehicles on the line, isn’t handy proof of that — it’s not an outright classic, and the expected thrills Rey and Juvi bring to the table are largely bottled in by the cage. But it’s in those limitations where a more nuanced picture of Rey (and Juvi, who is an utterly captivating wrestler, especially during this stretch of the 1990s) emerges.

It’s all about how the two adjust to the lack of space, which was crucial to both wrestlers as individuals and rivals. It’ll be a few months until their long-running rivalry makes its way north to ECW, but they bring some of that flavor to Aguascalientes early, kicking off the match by hurling chairs at each other as hard as they can. There’s more than a little bit of Sabu informing the movements of Guerrera and Misterio, with the chairs serving as both projectile and increasingly useless platforms, Misterio in particular utilizing them for moonsaults and truly reckless and not entirely fruitful leaps onto the cage. The biggest bit of ECW business in this match, though, comes when Rey straight up emulates Tommy Dreamer’s sickening Heat Wave 1995 chairshot to a handcuffed Raven, complete with the crucifix pose, as if he’d stolen a finisher in No Mercy.

None of this is as spectacular as the source material, but it adds a nice bit of grit to the proceedings. The chairshot in particular is fun to see taken out of its original context, and even better is that Juvi barely sells for it before getting back into the fight — he’s not a prissy grunge cult leader crumbling in the face of his bland jock rival’s pent-up rage, there are more important things on the line here than pride and Beulah McGuillicutty; like Misterio’s car. Of the two, it’s Guerrera who adjusts more handily to the restrictions of the cage. His offense is much more rugged than Misterio’s — witness the early uranage that he absolutely plants Rey with, and the later somersault leg drop that may be a compromise for an inability to land a 450 splash but should have featured regularly in his arsenal — and he gets to do a number on Misterio’s mask. His second, Damián 666, wearing his custom FMW jersey at ringside, also plays a more active role than Octagón, needling Rey from the outside, freeing Juvi from handcuffs after the chairshot, and being the direct cause of the finish, scrambling up the side of the cage to shake Rey from a legitimately dangerous perch.

There are better Rey/Juvi matches out there. Plenty of them, in fact, in AAA, ECW, and WCW. But to go back to a point I made earlier, the case for a wrestler’s greatness is built as much on odds and ends like this as it is upon a bedrock foundation of classics. Without the use of dives and springboards, the pace they cut is closer to the array of styles Misterio had begun dabbling in in 1995 — some of the bumps he takes from Juvi, like the uranage and the top rope powerbomb, suggest the stiffness of Japanese super junior style making an impression on him, the sheer spite of those moves speaking far louder than Guerrera’s punches could. He’s betrayed by the cage a little, particularly when it rejects him on a second attempt at leaping up onto it, but on the occasions where he and Juvi are able to do something, there are hints of the Bret/Owen cage match from SummerSlam ‘94, but with the spite the Hart brothers ultimately lacked — when Rey and Juvi take each other’s legs out, it’s with intent. 

Juventud Guerrera is the wrestler who comes out of this looking better — he’s a buzzsaw, cutting through Rey’s comebacks, responding to the environs by doling out some truly mean bombs — but that’s the power of a truly effective babyface, and Rey is arguably the best in history. Here he is, putting together a lot of what he’s seen early in his ascent to global stardom, bumping like a maniac and taking a couple of absurd risks — the final spot on top of the cage chief among them — to bring something different the Rey/Juvi dynamic, which becomes the touring affair Rey/Psicosis was the year before.

It is, in other words, a glimpse at an aspect of Rey’s greatness that’s faded into the background as he’s found ways to remain at or near the top of the wrestling world for far longer than anyone would have expected: how quickly he adapted to a rapidly globalizing wrestling world. Within months of this match, he’s in WCW, where, after feuding with Dean Malenko, he’s the guy acclimatizing many of the mainstays in WCW’s Cruiserweight division to American TV, often under the bright lights of Pay Per View. In 1996, he has Guerrera and Ultimo Dragon’s first WCW matches, Psicosis’ second, gets Super Calo a PPV payday, and wrestled Jushin Thunder Liger at Starrcade 1996 — the only time the two wrestled one on one as a bicep injury prevented a 2018 rematch at Strong Style Evolved. He is, in essence, doing what wrestlers like Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, Lord Steven Regal, and Chris Benoit were tasked with at various points in WCW’s early run, showing off WCW’s truly global perspective of wrestling while anchoring aspects of the product that weren’t tied to the new World order.

The difference is that Mysterio was younger and had less experience than his peers, which is why matches like this matter to his legend, filling in bits of acquired knowledge just before he’s tasked with being the ace of one of the most fondly remembered, viscerally satisfying elements of mainstream television wrestling in history. He just got it. He still does. Sorry he hasn’t found the time to slap on a chinlock, loser.

Rating: ****